Chapter 15: Ashgrove Hall

Ashgrove Hall had eight armed men on its steps and a banner of the royal house hanging from the porch roof where the family wreath should have been.

Sorrel rode in through her own gate on the king's saddle, with his arm around her waist.

Behind them came the chancellor and fourteen lords of the council.

Behind the lords came a closed wagon.

The guard captain had brought Linden up from the Ember Keep cellar in it, by the king's order, to reach Thornhall a day behind them.

Ronan wanted her in the room when Edmund spoke.

Ronan had called them out of Thornhall that morning, and not one had dared to refuse.

"You will see it with your own eyes," he had told them. "Nobody will say afterward that they were told."

The men on the steps looked at the lords, and at the black-haired man on the horse, and then at each other.

Nobody drew a sword.

Ronan swung down and lifted Sorrel to the ground.

"Stay beside me," he said.

"I wasn't going anywhere."

The great hall doors stood open.

It was the same room with the same long table, where the king's messenger had read the decree.

Her father sat in the middle of the floor, tied to a chair beneath the beam, with a rope looped over the wood above him.

Lord Perrin's lip was split.

He looked up when she came in, and his face broke.

"Sorrel. Don't come in. He means it."

"I know he does," she said.

Edmund stood beside the chair in his velvet doublet with a sword in his hand.

He had not slept, and the pleasant look was gone from his face, which showed what was under it.

"Brother," Edmund said. "You came. I thought you might send a letter."

"Cut him down," Ronan said.

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